CeleryKills

Geometry, perception, and the quiet collapse of the subjective–objective divide under an overcast sky

Here’s one I had to dredge up from notes about discussion I had which I thought I was right on, but later found out I was only partially right. This kind of thing is good to keep, because sometime reflection and more research create an opportunity for an odd topic

Ok, so this one started, as these things tend to in the Pacific Northwest, somewhere between a half-drunk Americano and a sky that couldn’t decide whether it was gray or twelve distinct philosophical positions on gray. There’s something about PNW winters.

About six months ago, I found myself arguing about color with the kind of seriousness usually reserved for housing policy or trail access. Maybe it was the lack of color that made it interesting. Was color objective, something anchored in wavelengths and cones and physics, or subjective, a small private hallucination dressed up as consensus? I remember insisting it was a hybrid, partly measurable, partly invented. I also remember feeling unreasonably pleased with myself for calling it a “negotiated reality,” which sounded smarter than it deserved.

The history of this argument is longer than most people want it to be. Newton set the tone by slicing light into a spectrum and implying that color might be a property of light itself, an objective feature of the world. Goethe pushed back, suggesting color lived in perception and experience. That tug of war never stopped. By the nineteenth century, Helmholtz and others were already trying to formalize perception, while Riemann quietly suggested that perceptual spaces might be curved rather than flat. That move, frankly, feels like someone tilting the chessboard instead of playing the game. Then Schrödinger, in the 1920s, took the hint and treated color as a geometric system, where hue and saturation and lightness could be derived from relationships within a space defined by perception itself (ScienceDaily, “Scientists finally complete Schrödinger’s 100-year-old color theory,” 2026).

What Riemann smuggled into the conversation is easy to miss if you’re not paying attention, which, to be fair, most people were not. In Euclidean space, distance behaves nicely, straight lines stay straight, and geometry feels like a well-mannered grid. Riemann proposed something less polite. In a curved space, the shortest path between two points is not necessarily straight, and distances themselves depend on where you are in the space. That idea carries over into perception. A “distance” between two colors is not a fixed gap measured in nanometers but a perceptual difference that bends with the structure of the system. Mathematically, this gets expressed through a metric tensor, the quiet machinery that defines how distances are computed at each point, even as the space itself warps. Schrödinger took that framework and tried to anchor hue, saturation, and lightness to these local geometries, as if color were something you navigate rather than something you simply receive (ScienceDaily, “Scientists finally complete Schrödinger’s 100-year-old color theory,” 2026). Which is a strange move, if you think about it. It turns color from a property into a landscape, and suddenly the question is not what color is, but how you move through it.

It always bothered me that Schrödinger’s model sounded both deeply objective and suspiciously human at the same time. Geometry suggests inevitability. But whose geometry? Ours, with our three cones tuned to red, green, and blue. Dogs don’t see that version of reality. Horses stretch it. Birds blow it open with extra channels that make our visible spectrum feel like a polite suggestion rather than a boundary.

Then there are the small irritations, the glitches that keep philosophers employed. The Bezold–Brücke effect is a good one. Increase brightness and a color shifts its hue even if the wavelength stays constant. Cyan slides toward blue, orange toward yellow, like the spectrum is quietly changing its mind when you turn up the light (Bezold–Brücke shift, Wikipedia). That is not how objective properties are supposed to behave. It is also not how purely subjective systems behave either, unless every observer shares the same quirk in exactly the same way. Which, inconveniently, we do.

There is a quieter consequence of those quirks that I did not appreciate at the time. Once brightness can shift hue without changing wavelength, the visible spectrum stops being a closed list and starts looking more like a suggestion. There are regions implied by the structure of perception that we cannot directly see, only approach or simulate. Color spaces end up containing coordinates that correspond to no single physical light, combinations and “imaginary” hues that exist mathematically but not phenomenally. We map them anyway. It is a strange admission that the system we use to describe color is already larger than the colors we can experience, like sketching coastlines we know we will never walk.

For a long time the argument sat there, suspended. Objective enough to measure, subjective enough to wobble. I was comfortable with that ambiguity. It matched the weather.

And then, recently, the geometry snapped into focus in a way that is hard to unsee. The Los Alamos work from 2026, the one that finally patched Schrödinger’s theory, did something almost annoyingly decisive. By defining the missing “neutral axis” and tightening the mathematics, the researchers showed that hue, saturation, and lightness are not layered on by culture or interpretation. They are intrinsic to the structure of the color space itself (ScienceDaily, 2026; Los Alamos National Laboratory, 2026). The system encodes perceived differences directly. Not metaphorically. Literally, in the geometry.

I keep coming back to that phrase. Intrinsic. It lands with a thud.

Because if the perceived distance between colors is built into the metric, then subjectivity looks less like freedom and more like compliance. We are not inventing color as much as inhabiting a curved space that constrains how differences can appear. The Wiley paper formalizes that geometry in computational terms, embedding experimental data into structured color spaces that behave consistently across observers (Bujack et al., “Geometric Structure of Color Perception,” 2026). Not identical experiences, but constrained ones. Predictable deviations rather than open-ended invention.

I’ll admit, that unsettled me. It means the argument I liked, my tidy hybrid model, was a little too tidy. It assumed a balance that may not exist. What we call subjectivity might just be the texture of navigating a shared geometric system with slightly different sensors. Dogs and birds are not counterexamples to objectivity. They are different coordinate systems.

Which makes the strange edges of perception even stranger. Take those experimental contact lenses that shift infrared light into visible wavelengths. The idea feels like cheating, like sneaking past the rules of the spectrum. But if you take the geometric view seriously, it is less a violation than an extension. You are not adding new subjective color in the abstract. You are inserting new coordinates into a structured space and letting the existing machinery absorb them. Night vision becomes a topological tweak. I find that both elegant and faintly absurd.

There is also something deeply Pacific Northwest about the conclusion, which I am resisting and failing to resist at the same time. The clouds here are not gray. They are compressions of a high-dimensional space into something our cones can pass along. The fact that we mostly agree on “gray” says less about the clouds and more about the constraints of our geometry. Consensus is not proof of objectivity, but it starts to look like evidence of shared structure.

When I think back to that conversation six months ago, I remember the confidence, the way I leaned on evolution as an argument for divergence. Primates evolved trichromatic vision for fruit detection and social signaling. Other animals tuned their perception to different ecological needs. All true. Still true. But the new work suggests that within each system, the experience of difference follows a strict internal logic that is not up for debate. Evolution chooses the space. Geometry governs what happens inside it.

So is color subjective or objective? The question now feels slightly mis-aimed, like asking whether a map is true or useful when it is quietly both. Color is objective in its structure and relational properties, subjective only in the sense that someone has to occupy the space for it to mean anything. Which is less dramatic than I wanted.

But here is the part that seems worth arguing about again, maybe more seriously than we did in grey light over coffee. If color has an intrinsic geometric structure, then this is not just a tidy answer to a philosophical question. It reaches into how we build cameras, displays, medical imaging systems, even the way physicists encode information in visual form. It nudges the line between perception and measurement, suggesting that “what it looks like” is not a decorative layer on top of reality but a constrained expression of it. Which raises an awkward question. If our experience of color is more structured than we thought, how much of what we call interpretation in other domains is also geometry in disguise. I am not saying it settles anything. I am saying it makes the old debate feel less like a pastime and more like a diagnostic tool for how we relate to the world beyond the comfortable scale of human senses.

I still prefer the cloudy answer, if I am being honest. It had more room for conversation. This one feels like stepping onto bedrock after a long stretch of wet trail. Stable, yes. Also a little disappointing. Though maybe that is just another perceptual effect, something like a philosophical Bezold–Brücke shift where increasing clarity nudges the hue of the question from mystery toward inevitability.

And I suppose I can live with that. Not comfortably. But consistently.

References

• Bezold–Brücke shift. Wikipedia.
• Los Alamos National Laboratory. “Understanding color perception.” 2026.
• ScienceDaily. “Scientists finally complete Schrödinger’s 100-year-old color theory.” June 6, 2026.
• Bujack, Roxana et al. “Geometric Structure of Color Perception.” Computer Graphics Forum, 2026.